


An Assortment of Terrible Ideas

by Big_Edies_Sun_Hat



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Also Sad Sometimes, Crowley does a bad American accent, Deleted Scene: 1800, Established Relationship, Ficlet Collection, Historical, Horseman Cameo, Humorous, M/M, Pre-Relationship, anyway here's wonderwall, extra demons, haw haw haw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22341445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Big_Edies_Sun_Hat/pseuds/Big_Edies_Sun_Hat
Summary: It was, on the whole, the sort of situation that eventually seems funny when you bring it up several decades later, over drinks.A collection of ficlets, to be added haphazardly, about various bad and/or delightful ideas that A. and C. had throughout history. (Gen fic with occasional references to romance.) Included: Aziraphale accidentally brings about Prohibition; Crowley accidentally brings about the worst candy in the known universe, and more TBD.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 29
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is from a prompt by @cheeseanonioncrisps: _Imagine [Aziraphale] getting a commendation every time he’s in the wrong right area for a martyrdom, or a holy war, or— hell, why not an inquisition? Who’s to say that Heaven and Hell 100% agree on what counts as good or evil all the time?_
> 
> (The Reverend, incidentally, was a real person, really from Ireland, but his family is fictional.)

_1841_

“He drank everything,” said Mrs. Murphy, then blew her nose. “Turned it to money and drank it. Our rent for the rooms. The China bowl I had from my mother, the mirror I had from my sister. The cross from around my neck! All of it went up the spout. Got pissed against the wall. And where he is now, God forgive me, I hope it’s at the bottom of the river—”

She snorted involuntarily, then wiped away tears and general damp, along with the grime from two days without a place to wash her face.

“Now I’ve ruined your handkerchief,” she said. “Ruined it.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake. What are handkerchiefs for?”

The white-haired gentleman across the little wooden table produced another one from his pocket. She stared at him, hardly daring to smile.

Men were monsters. This was something that Una Murphy, née Sullivan, had grown up understanding, and she had always accepted it. It was not something that she had ever let anger her, before all this. It was simply one of the facts of the world in which God the Father reigned on high, with the Son at His right hand, and the Blessed Virgin just beside, with popes and kings and queens at her feet, and somewhere far, far below, below the earth of the churchyard even, Una and her little boy had just been sitting on a stone step in the streets.

That stone step had been the last in a series of steps where she and her two young ones had huddled, moved along all day by stick or sharp word. Mrs. Murphy had hoped they had come late enough to be allowed to spend the night there; it was a corner overhang on a bookshop that looked well closed. But the proprietor had come back after dark, then stared at the little family on his front stoop.

Just as she had begun to beg and plead, he said: “Is there not anywhere warm for you to be tonight?”

It was the sort of fool thing that rich people said; that was not strange. What was strange about it was that he had said it to her in Irish—Leinster Irish, just as her parents spoke. Instead of answering him, she had burst into tears.

The next thing she knew, she and her boy had been herded gently into the back of his bookshop. Now she had been telling her troubles to him as if he could possibly know what they were, or care, while her baby slept and her boy sat on the floor by the gentleman’s chair, chewing on a sweet bun and leaning against the chair legs as if he were at his uncle’s feet.

“God forgive me,” she repeated, “but it’s wrong. It’s wrong that a woman should have a man’s child in all good faith that he can provide for them, that she should follow him to the ends of the earth for it and work herself sick, then see him drink it all away in front of her, because she hasn’t got the right to a penny of her own.”

“It _is_ wrong,” said the white-haired gentleman.

Again, Mrs. Murphy was lost for words. She had expected this shopkeeper, this Mr. Fell, to give her some calming nonsense about gratitude or God not giving us greater burdens than we could bear. In fact, she had almost looked forward to it. She had not expected him to agree with her.

“It is abominable that you should not have the control of your own property, that you and your children are so at his mercy.”

This made her nervous. Mrs. Murphy was not used to men who listened to her at all, much less agreed with her.

“Well,” she said, shaking her head. “Not any use going on and on, I suppose. What can a poor woman do? There’s no changing things on this earth.”

“But there is, madam. Earth is the only place where things _can_ change.”

“Ah. So.” Mrs. Murphy shifted with anxiety. “But what can _I_ do about it, with no money, no learning, no name, and being thirty years old already, almost?”

Mr. Fell leaned forward.

“If I were to tell you,” he said, “if I were to tell you that you could change the world by taking good care of these young ones—that they could remember, that they could help you, help make the world better—that you and your children _could_ make a world in which a woman did not have to be afraid that her husband could spend all the money in drink—would you like that?”

This was nonsense. This was absolute nonsense. But here, in this strange little shop, with this strange little man, and her young Francis safe and warm beside him, she seemed to be surrounded by a gentle firelit glow, something from beyond and behind the actual fire; and she found that somehow it did not hurt to believe Mr. Fell. She spoke softly, like a girl.

“I’d like that,” she said. “Only I think it’d take a miracle.”

“Well,” he said briskly, “so it might. But here we are now, eh? Let’s see what we can do for you.”

Ten minutes later, Mrs. Murphy and her children had left, full of gratitude and very good toast, carrying a letter of introduction to an exceptionally kind landlady who, he said, could tell her a good deal about going to New-York, if she liked. Mr. Fell then locked the door behind her, dusted off his hands theatrically, and went to his writing-desk.

Mr. Fell did not need to light a candle, but he liked to, and so he did. He had reports to finish filling out, which Mrs. Murphy might have supposed he would do, since it was the sort of thing that men of business did; but she would never know that he was filling out a report about her.

_1918_

“Yes. Um. Hello. I’ve come because—I’m awfully sorry to bother you—but I believe there’s been a mistake.”

Heaven’s receptionist, despite popular belief, does not stand outside gates, pearly or otherwise, checking a list like a maitre d’. Heaven’s receptionist does not meet the dead at all, in fact. Their job is to handle interoffice affairs.

The receptionist on duty that day did not like their job, but they did not like much of anything. They looked up at Aziraphale, who carried his hat in one hand and proffered a handsome certificate in the other. Unwillingly, the receptionist took it.

“A commendation. Congratulations, Principality,” they added, unconvincingly.

“Yes, well, you see, that’s just it. It’s that, er, that, I think that there has been a misprint as to what exactly it was issued _for_.”

They raised one eyebrow. Aziraphale went on.

“You see, I was expecting it would be for assistance in the establishment of women’s suffrage. I was working for decades with the ladies who—in fact, I was _Miss_ Fell for several years, which is not ideal for a small business owner, I can tell you, but—”

“It says here, ‘for service in the establishment of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United States of America and the legal institution of abstention from alcoholic beverages therein.’”

“Yes, and I _never_ —I mean, I don’t believe I could possibly have made such a vital contribution to, well, I hardly ever _go_ to America. Awful people. Extraordinary music, of course, but …”

Aziraphale was clearly attempting to share some joke, but he trailed off. The receptionist nodded gravely, and began to scribble some notes on their interoffice letterhead.

“In any case. I was hoping you could look into this—?”

Without another word, the receptionist finished their note, tore it from the pad, then slotted it into a cylinder which they pushed into the pneumatic tube on their desk. It disappeared with a _thunk_.

Heaven and Hell are places that exist beyond time, which is why their waiting rooms are particularly exhausting. Aziraphale stood with his hands behind him, clasping his fedora, staring out the great slanted windows into the endless sky, until at last there was another _thunk_ , and the receptionist said:

“Your request for clarification is in.”

Aziraphale hurried to the desk as the receptionist opened the cylinder, then uncoiled an interoffice memo. Eventually, they read aloud.

“1841. Lifesaving intervention, counseling, and provision of vital assistance to Reverend Francis Murphy, leader of the Blue Ribbon League. The Blue Ribboners collected over fifteen million pledges of abstention from alcohol and formed a vital part of the movement towards the Eighteenth Amendment.”

“1841? Um,” said Aziraphale, “can I just see the rest of that, for a moment, if you’ll—”

Aziraphale took the note away with polite force, then stared at it.

“Oh. That’s … right, yes. The little one, with Mrs … I thought I’d … I didn’t realize what he’d, er, actually _accomplish._ He was a boy at the time, you see, and, um. Well. That answers that.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with,” the receptionist said, in definitive tones.

“No, I don’t suppose there is. Thank you.”

Aziraphale turned away, shoulders slumped, and walked down the long, echoing hall.

At roughly the same time, Crowley was claiming credit for this same movement on the strength of having been in New York for a few months. All he had actually done was to spread despairing rumors about it, partly on general principles and partly so that dealers would panic and sell him their pre-1860s wines. It was, on the whole, the sort of situation that eventually seems funny when you bring it up several decades later, over drinks.


	2. Chocolates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where did Crowley get a box of chocolates in 1800?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The deleted scene in which Crowley tries to bring Aziraphale chocolates is totally delightful for me, more so because chocolates--chocolate candies to be eaten, that is, instead of chocolate to be used for cocoa and baking--were very rare at the time. Clearly ~~this is a ridiculous historical nitpick~~ Crowley created chocolate candies.

_1800_

As a confectioner, Mr. Fry was rather luckier than he was good, although he was a fair amount of both. His shop was well placed and had good traffic, as well as a broad shop window that let in fine natural light and let out strong, sweet vapors. He had not only regular clients but ready stock and frequent buyers for it, from sticky children to respectable ladies and gentlemen and, better yet, servants from great houses.

This kind of trade allowed him to keep cacao beans in stock, from which, at great personal effort and expense, he could make little tablets out of chocolate itself—tablets that were not intended to be grated into milk and made into cocoa, but to be eaten out of hand, like dried figs. Mr. Fry generally did this only for special orders, but, on occasion, he had ideas about the chocolate that cooled; and he wondered if these ideas would pay for themselves. One day, he decided to chance it.

Showing the chocolate poured into bar molds—and the scent of it—was good for business in general, and so, on that bright and cool spring day, Mr. Fry worked where he could be seen to do it, on a metal table beside his window. And, as always, boys and girls gathered to watch him, to jump up on their tiptoes, to try to draw him out.

“What’s that black slop?”

“Fat lot you know. That’s cocoa! That’s little bits and bites of cocoa!”

“Ask him! Mister, what’re you making? Mister. Oi!”

This, he ignored. The fact that Mr. Fry wanted passersby to stop and look did not mean that he liked them. Talking didn’t get the candy made. They were always chattering to each other and to him, asking stupid questions like—

“How much for the lot of them?”

Mr. Fry suddenly had a striking feeling in his head, as if he were a cupboard opened and rifled and shut again. It was like a headache without the ache, and it made him irritable. He turned to snap at whoever had just asked him that, then thought suddenly and uncomfortably:

_No. I like this man. I’ll listen to him and answer any question he asks._

“Oh. Er.” Mr. Fry blinked, and took another look at the well-turned-out gentleman who had spoken.

_Incidentally those spectacles aren’t the least bit unusual. For eye conditions, sort of thing._

“Well. These chocolates are all accounted for, sir. But they’re worth five pounds altogether.”

The red-headed gentleman leaned at the window, resting his chin on his long hands, and gave a low whistle. Five pounds was nearly a workman’s annual wage.

“I _say_ all accounted for,” added Mr. Fry, out of the same odd, sideways impulse to talk to the man, “but you haven’t yet seen what’s to do with the chocolate left in the bowl.”

“And what’s that?”

To judge from his well-brushed black clothing and gleaming new hat, this was a man with expensive tastes. Mr. Fry decided to let him take the lead.

“You tell me, sir. What’s your favorite sort of sweet?”

“Me?” He shrugged. “It’s not for me, but, ah … what are the sugar bits with the almonds in? The smooth ones?”

“Almond comfits? Joseph! Bring us a dozen almond comfits.”

The shop assistant turned from the counter, damp and harried.

“What? Oh. Right, Dad.”

A moment later, Mr. Fry took the handful of comfits and placed each in a small square in an oiled metal mold. Over this, he poured the remaining melted chocolate, then said,

“Let them stand till they’re hard, and they’ll be the best candied almonds in London. The king himself hasn’t got any like this.”

Mr. Fry looked at his visitor with pride, as well as mild anxiety; he had not really closed the sale. But the red-headed gentleman did seem pleased, in the broad, flat way of someone who is trying not to let on that he is pleased.

“You don’t make a lot of them with the chocolate on, then?”

“No, no. These almonds are worth their weight in gold now, sir. Not just for _any_ customer.”

“Why not?”

It was a strange question for a gentleman to ask. It was even stranger for Mr. Fry to answer, but he felt compelled to do so.

“Too expensive, sir. There’s so much work in making the pouring chocolate. Then there’s all the sugar and cream and vanilla—won’t taste right otherwise—and what with the price of beans, it was a speculation to make them in the first place. Only I’d been thinking of chocolate candies for some time. Had to look for the right sort of purchaser.”

The red-headed gentleman grinned.

“A rich idiot? Like me?”

“Sir!”

“Well, it’s your lucky day,” he said. “You’ll sell me these for a guinea, and also for the price of this.”

He lowered his voice.

“What you want is to get rid of the fat from the beans. That’s what’s expensive. Sort out a way to cook it up and drain it off. Make the beans into a powder. Then beat up the powder with the cheapest oil you can find. That’ll make you three times as much, or more. Pour it over your almonds, or sugared whatever-you-like; charge a few pennies apiece; and every fool in the country will get fat on your candy. Including yourself.”

The red-headed gentleman nodded at the chocolate-covered almonds, which were unexpectedly solid and cool. Mr. Fry rushed to break them from the mold as his customer went on.

“And that’s good for me, too. Greed _and_ gluttony. And gluttony adds up to sloth and ill health. Wasteful, too. Not a bad job of work when I’m skiving off it today, you think?”

Mr. Fry paid no attention to what the gentleman said; in fact, he barely seemed to hear it. He had just had an amazing idea about how to make three times’ worth of chocolate from his beans. It had come to him as he was standing there listening to the man stand there and prattle on about—what? It hardly mattered. He waved his assistant over, still pretending to listen.

“Joseph! Wrap these up for—sir, is this for a lady?”

“Hardly,” said the gentleman, and winked so broadly that his spectacles twitched. “But wrap it up for one anyhow.”

The chocolates, as it happened, did not go to their intended recipient. There was a good deal of haste and confusion and bad acting later that day, and what with one thing and another, the box was left on a window ledge. There, it was eventually picked up by a light-fingered young woman who parceled the candy out among her sisters and brothers. The children liked them quite a lot, except for the youngest, who spat his out and said, “Ergh, ‘s all _bitter_. Ruined the bit with the sugar in.”

Crowley did not get what he had hoped for that day; but he did, at least, have something to put in his monthly reports.

_2007_

It is wonderful, of course, to give a gift that has been selected so well that it delights someone, but between very good friends, it can also be wonderful to give a gift that has been selected purely and carefully to irritate.

These days, whenever Crowley came back from America, he made sure to bring back American chocolates for Aziraphale. He took a quiet pleasure in watching Aziraphale attempt to be polite after biting into, say, a Whitman’s coconut cream. A piece of Hershey’s had nearly made him choke.

“Amazing stuff, isn’t it,” Crowley would say proudly. “Do you know, they make it with paraffin? Marvel of modern engineering, is what it is.”

On this occasion, Crowley had just come to the end of a long trip from Palo Alto, followed by[1] a wheeled suitcase (which contained, among other things, Tootsie Rolls), when he was greeted by a terrible smell in his apartment. Any apartment that has been largely left alone for two months[2] will smell stale, but this was rotten, a pungent, almost chemical reek.

_Oh, no,_ he thought. _Not another memo_.

But there it was, on his desk: a memo, left for weeks unattended.

The worst thing about the memoranda, to Crowley, was peeling them off his furniture. This had not been a problem in the past, but there were fashions in Hell, slow though they were. For hundreds of years, memoranda had been written on a vellum made of human skin, tattooed and flayed from souls who had no choice but to regenerate their tormented flesh, and that was one thing, but at least they had always been tanned. Lately, the skin had been damp and freshly torn, sticky on the back, hairy on the front.

This one, aside from everything else, had gone bad. Crowley took a paper knife and scraped it up. The mess quietly vanished as he read it, turning it carefully this way and that to the light. Clerical demons had terrible handwriting.

Afterwards, he set it down and did what he had meant to do when he came in, which was to get something cold to drink out of the kitchen. There, he found himself standing in front of the open refrigerator, somehow unable to stop thinking long enough to reach inside for anything he saw in front of him.

“I didn’t,—” he muttered, “I never …”

Anyone can ask Heaven a question. There is no guarantee of an answer, and the asker may have to wait a while before they get anything that might conceivably be that answer, but no special equipment is required. Anyone can ask Hell a question, too, but a fair amount of special equipment is required, and the answer is going to cost a good deal more than the asker intended to pay.

All of this is as true for employees as it is for the client base. Crowley was not about to head to the Back Office simply to discuss a memo. No evangelical worked to stay out of Hell with more care and attention than Crowley did. He showed his face when he had to, but he knew very well that not too many demons liked him, for the simple reason that Someone Else liked him too much. For the sake of his health, he stayed in the field, well away from the vortex of Hell’s office politics.

He was, therefore, not about to call and ask why exactly he had been sent a commendation for destroying millions of acres of rainforest.

Crowley lied to the Back Office quite a lot. He kept a neat and coded notebook about it, disguised as a discussion of commodity prices. As any liar knows, keeping the story straight is key to getting away with it. But try as he might, he could not remember taking any credit for _that_. And if he did not remember one thing, then he wouldn’t remember another; then soon enough he would be caught out; then there would be audits; and then—well, they wouldn’t kill him. Of that, he was certain. They would spend eons not killing him.

He thought very hard, sitting upside down on his throne, twirling his space pen in midair.

Crowley had only one person he could talk to honestly, and—no. He was not bringing this up with Aziraphale. What would Aziraphale do? He would be _disappointed_. He would look _sad_. Then next thing, Crowley would find himself in a wrecked forest on the other end of the world, shouting at tree stumps until they sprouted new branches and scions and … that sounded nice, actually. Which was why it was not going to happen. He didn’t do _nice_. He couldn’t.

There was nothing for it. If he wanted to know what this was about, he was going to have to go Below.

When Crowley was expected in Hell, he always made an entrance: dressed to the bleeding edge of the moment, sauntering with polished ease, greeting everyone by name. (“Semyaza! You look amazing, darling. Belphegor, you feeling better? Good, good. And Paimon! Love the head, is it new?”)

When he was not expected—or expected by those that he did not want to see—he did what he was named to do. He crawled. He made himself smallish and dark, and he burrowed with a blunt snake’s nose to find the service entrance, the loading docks, the places where imps and lesser demons smoked hideous blends of plant matter and complained about their jobs.

Sometimes he greeted them, looking like nothing much: a reptile head wrapped in some discarded filth. Sometimes he said nothing, watching, listening for anything that might help him learn what he wanted to know. Snakes cannot hear very well, but they can be patient and very, very still.

After a few quiet expeditions, Crowley found himself coiled next to a damp brown imp that looked like a broiled axolotl, chattering to a small legless imp that was something like a star-nosed mole. He was very nearly asleep when he heard the brown thing say:

“—and atop of that, Snowy’s been about.”

“Who?” said the legless mole.

“Snowy. Them that has the Crown. Or will have.”

The legless mole’s answer was hard to make out. The brown thing said to it:

“Snowy’s been talking to the Managers. All about what Hell’s done to foul the earth. Wanting to know the things we’ve come up with.”

The brown thing chewed on a small riblike bone.

“Mostly that Crowley bastard again, faffing about, getting the credit. Snowy _likes_ him.”

“Why?”

“Lots of things. Invented chocolate, one.”

The legless mole chittered some kind of answer.

“Don’t like it either. Aren’t supposed to, are we?” said the brown thing. “I’n’t for us. But it makes a huge mess to make it. Chopping down trees and whatnot for the farms and the papers. Lots of trees. Making loads of mess out of it. That’s what Snowy likes. A huge mess.”

The legless mole squeaked again.

“’S right. Liked the old days better, when Snowy went about piling up bodies. Like Red. Bodies pile up around Red, all right.”

There was a suspicious absence of sound as a snake uncoiled and poured itself away. The legless mole waved its star-nose and squeaked. The brown thing shrugged what might have been shoulders.

“What do I care what it was?” it said. “Ain’t paid to. Ain’t paid at all, in fact.”

Generally, there was some kind of warning before Aziraphale found an entire demon on the sofa in his back office, but one day it happened like this: he walked in with an armful of work and saw Crowley there, sprawled face-down at full length like someone’s forgotten scarf.

On this occasion, he was, very quietly, snoring. Aziraphale dropped his stack of papers on his desk with a _smack_. Crowley twitched.

“ _Crowley_?”

“Mnh?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Could I be?” His voice was muffled by a throw pillow. “What’ve you got?”

“Well, there’s—Look,” said Aziraphale, “what have you been _doing_?”

“Nothing,” said Crowley, unmoving. “Nothing, just looking about in their heads. Finding the odds and ends. Putting them together. Just saying. I only ever just _say_.”

This was his line in an argument that was many, many years old. The angel left it where it was, and sighed.

“It’s been months. You might have rung. Where have you been?”

“In Hell. But mostly California.” Crowley righted himself and shook out his hair. “Sorry not to bring you back anything American this time.”

“Oh, no, no,” Aziraphale said quickly. “That’s quite all right. —Look at the state of you! Stay right where you are. There’ll be cocoa in a moment.”

Crowley curled himself back into a ball and moaned into the upholstery, but Aziraphale, who was used to that sort of thing from him, did not stop to ask him why.

[1] He only laid his fingers on the handle if anyone was around to see.

[2] The plants had each other, at least. They did not know much, being plants, but they knew that Crowley was honest. If he told them they wouldn’t need watering for two months, they believed him.


	3. Candlemas

Aziraphale always liked Candlemas, for the simple reason that there were crepes, and for all the reasons that there _were_ crepes, which were anything but simple. These weeks, in the north, were the killing time, the punishment of winter: if not storms, then endless gray, dwindling rations, snow without light in it, thick wet roads. And people stirred themselves inside to protest at it; so too did the birds and the deer in the wood, the little creatures that dwelled beneath the damp snow.

Girls wove little crosses; men lit fresh candles; people called to the sun as they had before, calling it Imbolg, and as they would again; and in whatever small room Aziraphale called home, the knowledge made him warm. But no one does much for Candlemas anymore.

Crowley never cared one way or the other. He prefers to sleep through February; this, he says, is brumation, and very natural for him.[1] But nonetheless, he brought about the American Imbolg, which people do quite a lot for, every year. 

He hadn’t meant to. It was just that he had spent quite a bit of the ‘50s and ‘60s Stateside, telling people about television and all the amazing things it could do for new markets. He’d been on Madison Avenue then, doing all kinds of work: encouraging people to make smoother ads, to lock down more trademarks, to design new foods that you couldn’t stop eating. Eventually, he had gone home, or what he called home, and did his best to forget about all the idiot plans of all the idiots he had met so he could get some rest.

Every year since then, without the faintest idea of what was going on or what he had to do with it, he has slept through Super Bowl Sunday.

[1] He has to make this argument every year once he’s married.


	4. Serenade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes a terrible idea is terrible not because it's terrible but because no one understands it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was for the #ineffablevalentines prompt "Serenade."

_1996_

The girl, who was sixteen but actually fourteen and trying very hard not to let it show, tossed her hair carefully aside. It was a beautiful day in the park and she’d come here with _him_ and she could _not ruin this_ because it was very important and he had his guitar with him and _everything_ and he was the most amazing boy really actually he was technically a man he was seventeen years old and he was paying attention to _her_.

The boy, who was seventeen but actually new at the guitar and trying very hard not to let it show, set himself down next to the girl on the wall by the pond. He opened the case and slowly, deliberately tuned it up, which was to say that he adjusted the pegs, plucked the strings, then adjusted the pegs back to where they had been in the first place.

“Well,” he said, and strummed a few times. “Well. Er.”

He looked up at her, caught her bright green eyes, and saw her smile. There was nothing he could say to a smile like that. The boy dipped his head to the guitar, his blond hair hanging down low, and began to play.

Two minutes later, the girl had not moved. She sat with the same bright eyes, the same bright smile, as her back began to ache, and she listened—

“By now you should have somehow

Realized what you gotta do

I don’t believe that anybody

Feels the way I do about you now—”

—and thought: _oh no oh God why oh please I am in hell_.

This was not, of course, hell; this was St. James’ Park on a lovely spring day. However, entirely coincidentally and without her notice, there had been a demon nearby, and he had passed right in front of her. And just briefly, he had noticed her—or rather, noticed the boy with the guitar—and permitted himself a moment of satisfaction with his work.

Crowley had invented the serenade. He had been there to give a shoulder-shake of encouragement when the first awkward youth, plucking at a poorly tuned harp, decided to sit down on the banks of the Tigris and sing to his love. But in all the years since, no one, in Crowley’s opinion, had ever understood the genius of it.

“Ah,” Hastur had said. “Incitement to Lust.”

“No, you see, that’s just _it_ ,” Crowley had said. “It’s bloody exhausting. The young lady—or the boy—has got to sit there and be beautiful and stare just off in the distance and hold their head _just so,_ and they’ve got to _like_ it. If they _don’t_ like it, they have to sit there and take it, and even if they _do_ like it, they’re sore and tired and embarrassed from everybody looking at them, and the glow’s gone off the whole thing. The lady’s annoyed and the bloke looks like a fool and it all ends up in Wrath.”

For all this, Crowley received one of Hastur’s looks, the kind that suggested that Crowley was going to be swallowed alive by a gaping void as soon as Hastur could see to it.

“Or you could do Lust,” Crowley amended. “Lust is good too.”

None of the other demons understood. Not even Aziraphale understood it. He’d been delighted to hear that the serenade was Crowley’s invention, but when Crowley had explained why he had invented it, he only rolled his eyes.

“Now I call that cynicism,” Aziraphale said, as they walked through Mayfair on a sunny spring day in 1850. “I should think that would be lovely, to listen to a song from someone who loved you. Or at least nice.”

“You would,” said Crowley.

For entirely unrelated reasons, neither one of them looked at the other as they spoke. There were perfectly nice shop windows on Aziraphale’s side of the walk, and there were excellent buildings visible to Crowley on his side of the walk, and so there was no particular reason for either of them to avoid the other’s eyes, which was definitely not what they were trying to do.

“In any case,” said Crowley. “Lunch?”

_2019_

It had only been two days. There were a lot of things to sort out, so many things that Aziraphale was worried, almost worried sick now. Was it too much trouble? Was _he_ too much trouble?

“Look, look, it’s all right,” Crowley had said to Aziraphale; “there’s always things to sort out, with everyone, when they, uh … ”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “But—no. Look, one example: here. I don’t believe that everyone has had to cover all their wireless receivers and televisual devices with blankets because the Princes of Hell might look in upon them at any moment.”

“Fair,” said Crowley. “That’s fair to say.”

They had just returned and entered the half-dark in Crowley’s flat, where not much had changed, except for the blankets. These were not just blankets—Aziraphale had sealed them with powerful wards—but they were plain and gray and gave the impression that Crowley was preparing to move out. Aziraphale had insisted on the blankets and the rituals almost as soon as he arrived on Saturday night— _they_ must not _hear or see what I’m about to say to you_ , he’d whispered. And they hadn’t.

The two of them had not been back to the apartment since Sunday morning. They had gone instead to the bookshop, and done exactly what each of them needed to do very badly: Crowley had slept for twenty-four hours straight, and Aziraphale had spent that time doing inventory, not because he doubted that everything was in its right place but because he wanted to touch every book’s spine and know it was there.

“What exactly was it you needed here?” said Aziraphale.

“Got to get my phone, for one,” said Crowley absently, craning his neck as he searched. “And the iPad.”

“ _Those_ things?” This was more than Aziraphale’s usual disdain for touchscreens. “They’re under the blankets! They’re under _seal_. The screens, the speakers—they’re dangerous. What do you want them for?”

Crowley shrugged. He poked at one blanket with the end of a pen.

“Weather. Stock prices. Youtube. Mostly just to not be afraid of any bloody screen or speaker I ever see again. —Ow!”

Crowley tried pulling up the blanket with a pen, but, as Aziraphale had sealed it with a ward against demonic interference, it snapped him with a spark.

“Like walking into a bloody electric fence,” he muttered, wringing his hand.

“An electric fence that you watched me build _and_ watched me set a sign on that said ‘Electric Fence’,” said Aziraphale. “Let me.”

He stepped around Crowley, spoke grave and ancient words in plain irritation, and pulled the blanket away. Behind him, Crowley shut his eyes briefly with satisfaction; the trick was simple, the argument avoided.

“There they are,” Aziraphale said, brushing salt away from the top of the sound system where the phone and the tablet were set. “The wretched things. Safe to—well, safe to touch, anyhow. And the hi-fi, too, if you want it.”

“The _hi-fi_ ,” said Crowley. “Do you know how long it has been since I have heard anyone call a sound system a hi-fi?”

“It’s hardly—”

Aziraphale cut himself off. Crowley had not sneered at him as he said that. Instead, he was smiling, fresh and plain and open, a new smile for a new world. He stepped in close, touched his forehead to the angel’s. Aziraphale, flushing slightly, took the glasses gently away, then tucked them into Crowley’s pocket. His hands fell to Crowley’s sides, and Crowley caught them.

The flat, which always seemed to have been empty for weeks, was suddenly brighter. This was because Aziraphale gave off an imperceptible glow when he was in love, but neither of them had quite realized this yet. The pair of them stood brow to brow, snow to embers, saying nothing, only grinning together at something neither of them could name.

“Can you stand it?” Aziraphale said at last. “Are you sure you won’t be sick of me?”

“Oh, I’ve _been_ sick of you,” said Crowley, and kissed his cheekbone. “Been sick of you for ages, sometimes. It never makes a difference.”

“Monster.”

Crowley rested his arms over Aziraphale’s shoulders. His voice was as low as smoke.

“Stay with me here tonight.”

“Anywhere,” said Aziraphale.

There was no hesitation in his answer. Still, Crowley could feel anxiety in the angel’s body.

“We’ll make it comfortable,” he said. “You’re not afraid of this thing, are you? Listen—”

Noiselessly, he snapped his fingers. The sound system’s ambient lights glowed blue.

“Well,” said Aziraphale, with a nervous laugh, “there’s afraid and there’s _afraid_ ; I mean, are you going to put on one of those albums of yours, because I would in fact dread—”

“Nah. I had it on the radio, last time.”

The stereo did make some hellish and unsettling noises as Crowley searched for stations, but even Aziraphale was used to that.

“What is it you’re trying to tune in?”

“None of this. Everything’s terrible,” said Crowley. “How about … something …”

He was murmuring absently to himself as the stations changed, just as anyone else might do, except that anyone else would have had to touch a knob or button of some kind, whereas Crowley simply waved his finger slightly in midair. As he did so, he thought to himself: something sweet, not too sweet, old, not too old, with horns and strings and all, the sort of thing he’d like …

At that moment, far away, a digital radio station’s playlist changed. A muted trumpet began to play.

“There,” said Crowley. He put his arms around Aziraphale’s waist, then steadied himself on his feet. Aziraphale laughed anxiously and dropped his gaze, but Crowley touched his forehead to his, gently lifting his face.

_I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz, when an old friend I happened to see—_

“You can’t mean it,” Aziraphale said, but his eyes were shining. “You want to dance? Right here?”

Crowley slid himself close, and Aziraphale, knowing nothing else to do, embraced him back.

“Yes and no,” said Crowley. “See, the trick is, when you don’t really want to dance—you just want to, you know, have a song with someone—you just stand there, and you sway. Like this.”

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “That’s … yes, that’s …”

_… and while they were dancing, my friend stole my sweetheart from me …_

Crowley tucked his head against Aziraphale’s shoulder, as the pair of them rocked slowly back and forth. Aziraphale sighed with contentment, with dissolving fear.

 _I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz_ —

“Can’t play any instruments,” murmured Crowley, his breath stirring the curls of Aziraphale’s hair. “I mean, not properly, not without magic. So. Can’t play you a song. Hope you like this one.”

“Oh, Crowley.”

“Might take something up, of course,” Crowley went on, idly turning his fingertips in a circle against the velvet of Aziraphale’s vest. “Might have some time on our hands.”

“Time,” said Aziraphale gently. His hands slid gently down the sateen of Crowley’s back. “Yes, there … there could be time.”

“I could play you something in public. Embarrass you to death. Make you want to crawl under a table.”

“I would adore it,” said Aziraphale.

“You would.”

Somewhere in an office building, not too far and not too close, a twenty-year-old intern got shouted at because Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” was very decidedly not part of Planet Rock’s music library, let alone its format, and people had called in and tweeted about it. The intern shouted back.

There were meetings. There were analyses. There was even a brief examination of the floor’s surveillance footage. In the end, it was all chalked up to some kind of coding error in the software, and no one lost their jobs over the unauthorized “Tennessee Waltz.” After all, as the supervisor said later, nobody who’d called had actually _complained_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actually, Patsy Cline did a better version of "Tennessee Waltz," but it's less known from her.


	5. Versions of the Bible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Tumblr post prompted me to write GO fic about Jack Chick. I have learned a disconcerting amount about [Chick tracts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract), for personal and then academic reasons. This is very close to how Chick got the idea for the first tract in his famous style.

_1962_

_El Monte, California_

A hard, hot car on a hard, hot desert road, with a hard, hot man inside it, dripping sweat into the armpits of his short-sleeved button-down shirt, tugging his blunt black tie: this was lunch hour. The man inside this Hudson Wasp was not alone on the road, although he felt that he was, and this was good. He had to get away from his office, which was air-conditioned and pleasant enough, but full of his colleagues. Air conditioning, in company like that, was the devil’s snare.

This man, a designer, was not the shortest of his colleagues, not the fattest; he was a man in shirtsleeves with thick glasses and a slide rule, just like the rest of them. From across the office, The Boss—for this was the time of a The Boss, the kind who came unexpectedly to dinner and judged your future by your wife’s cooking—would not have been able to pick him out, no matter how many time he had shaken his hand.

But this man was different. For one thing, he was only a designer, not an aircraft engineer, not one of the lifeblood-cells of his company. He drew up charts and blueprints and flyers at Astro-Science, and relied on the general resemblance around the office to get what respect he could. For another thing, he was washed in the blood of the Lord.

“— _just joining us on KRQ, that was ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ from the Monroe Brothers, and_ —”

The car radio snapped silent as the Wasp drew up to a rank little diner and parked in a little lot a few doors down.

It wasn’t that the designer thought he was _better_ than anyone in the office. He preached on Sundays; he spent his nights at the kitchen table, illustrating tracts for the local churches; but he would be lost if he thought that was what mattered to God. He was a sinner, and as bad a sinner as any of them, the skirt-chasers or the mean drunks or even the idol-worshipers.[1]

The difference was simply that he had accepted God’s gift. And sometimes it was a hard gift to bear. He loved his colleagues, he truly did, and it was a love that made his teeth grind and his head ache, because none of them would _take_ it from him.

How would he give them that? How could he get through to—

“— _agh_!”

“—sorry! Sorry, gosh, sir, I just—oh, would you look at the mess, I didn’t see you there, I—” The designer rubbed his round forehead, peeling his glasses off the bridge of his nose.

How had he just run straight into someone else when the sidewalk had been empty ten seconds ago?

He dropped to his knees in a spasm of desperate politeness. The stranger was a salesman of some kind, and his sample case had fallen open everywhere. The sidewalk was full of colorful pamphlets and flyers.

“Oh, don’t be worried,” said the stranger brightly, as he fixed the brim of his hat and eased his long, bony body down next to the designer amongst the small mess on the sidewalk. “Not a bad day for it. Dry as Hades, huh? Besides, this stuff’s meant to fly away. In a manner of speaking.”

“I, uh … I see.”

“I’m in the commercial print game,” he said. “The name’s—”

Just then, a car drove by. The designer barely heard the name, nor could he think of it later; he was too busy trying to place the voice. The fellow had an odd accent—Ohio? the West?—broad and nasal and hard on its _r_ ’s.

“—so I’m squiring this stuff around, see? Take a few home with you. See what you think. Name’s on the card.”

The designer shook his head. _See_? Who said that? Did the man think he was Edward G. Robinson?

Between them, they had quickly scooped the mess back into the case, but the designer still had a handful of odds and ends and one flat, inky little comic. The stranger quickly snapped the case shut.

“No, keep ‘em. Those are for you,” he said. “For the discriminating customer.”

Behind his aviator glasses, he winked. The designer looked down at what he had in his hands, then shuddered with recognition. One of these things was … well. Clearly, this man was part of some kind of _enterprise_. He felt a hot, spiteful burst of Christian love within him, and prepared to witness.

“Sir,” he said firmly, “won’t you let me give you some lunch? I was just stopping in, and I’d _really_ like to talk about your line of work—”

“No time, no time,” said the stranger, brushing cheerfully past, turning into the alleyway at the end of the block. “Time waits for no man, sort of thing.”

 _Now_ he sounded more like an Englishman than anything else. But what would an Englishman be doing selling … _novelties_ on the street in California? And what would he—what would anyone want with the alleyway behind the diner?

“Sir, I don’t think that’s a way out—”

The designer ran after him a little ways. But wherever he had gone, he had gone there. The alley was empty.

He crumpled the little comic in his hand, and it peeled open to its middle page. On it, Popeye was doing absolutely unspeakable things to Olive Oyl.

Just as he had thought. This was an eight-pager. [Tijuana bibles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tijuana_bible), they’d called them in the war—some of the boys traded them for cigarettes. Once a bunkmate had tossed one down at him: _here, Holy Joe, bet you want it more than me_.

He had balled that up and thrown it right away, just as he did now with all the paper in his hands, shoving it heavily into a wrought-iron trash can as he headed back towards the diner. His good deed had not gone unpunished. He had the strangest headache now.

If you had told the designer that he had met a demon that day, he would not have been surprised. He would gladly have told you that he had met demons every day—for all his life, in fact. He didn’t really _see_ them, of course, but to him they were so present, so heavily alive, that it only took a little imagination, and he had more than a little of that.

The demons in California capered behind the dull-eyed women who sat at bars at noon; the men who slunk into parks late at night; the husbands who screamed at wives and the wives who screamed back; the teenagers who wandered down the highway towards Los Angeles, looking for everything and nothing at all. And they followed _him_ , too; so far, he had beaten back every one of them.

Demons were, in his experience, blunt and cruel and rather stupid, full of cackling and plots. He was, as it happened, largely right about this, but only by coincidence. The designer had just now met his first demon, and all that was going on in his head was:

 _Anyhow. What was I thinking of? Lunch. Right. Perfectly normal fella. Normal glasses_.

What was strange about the headache wasn’t the hurting, so much; he was used to that. Instead, it was a rummaging feeling, as if someone were trying to pick up his thoughts and memories in his head and take a quick look at each one of them.

_… take this to go—how do you get through to people? I mean how do I get …_

Unable to stand the noise of the diner, he took his sandwich and a Coke bottle and wandered back to the car, where there was a tin of aspirin.

… _the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God—no, why would you say that? That sounds Episcopalian. Poor Episcopalians. Poor fat country-club Cadillac Episcopalians, wouldn’t know the Word of the Lord from their three-martini lunch. Lunch—What was I ... No, you can’t_ say _something is the Word of the Lord, you have to sneak up to people. When they’re not looking for it—_

He sat in the driver’s seat, chewing absently, a copy of _The Two Babylons_ laid open against his lap. Along the sidewalk, a young woman—a girl, really—sauntered past with her arm in the arm of a beatnik, or whatever it was they called themselves these days. The boy’s hair was down to his collar, and if _he_ was any judge of these things, the girl did not even have a girdle on underneath.

Trash, his mother would have called them. Pure trash. Again, the pain and anger of his love welled up in him. Kids like that—what would they listen to? What would they _see_?

 _There you are, Jack. Trash. They’ll look at trash_.

It was a sudden and self-assured voice in his head, one he had never heard before and never would again. He flashed back to the eight-pager he’d had in his hand, and nearly dropped his sandwich in his lap. That was it! Trash!

If they wanted to see trash, _he’d_ give them trash—he’d give them the word of the Lord all wrapped up in it, just like a sandwich. He’d give them eight-pagers. Eight-pagers for Christ! What if they were as easy to get as the other kind? Or more? It would be a demon’s nightmare—

His mind buzzed with images. Where would he get the money? Where would he find a press? He vaguely remembered someone he’d met that afternoon—did he say he was in the printing line?—then shook his head. It didn’t matter. The Lord would provide. He had provided the idea, after all; the rest was sure to follow.

Behind the nearest fence, in the alleyway by the diner, a red-bellied snake moved along from beneath a trashcan lid and eased through the wooden slats.

If you had told the designer that he had met an angel that day, he would not have been surprised. The angel would not have come as a person, of course; to say that could happen in this day and age was the kind of sweet story that sounded harmless and had the New Age in the back of it. But an angel could stand behind you, plain and stern in his plain, stern robes, and bring you inspiration.

This was, in fact, exactly what an angel had been assigned to do. The problem was that the angel in question could not stand California.[2]

“… and I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t know you were out there already, I _really_ wouldn’t. Is, er, is El Monte far?”

“Nnnn.”

Crowley clicked his complimentary hotel pen against his teeth and glanced at a map. He was in Los Angeles, where he had been keeping an eye on the television industry, developments in modern architecture, and martinis. Like most people from across the Atlantic, Aziraphale had no idea how far things were from each other in California, and he might as easily have asked Crowley to pop over to San Francisco for him.

“No, bit of luck there,” said Crowley, swinging his legs across the leather arm of the LC2 chair. “Not a long drive, but—divine inspiration? It’s not really my, uh, I mean, I could fake it, I suppose, but—”

“Oh, you needn’t do any preaching. He’s already a lay preacher of some sort. Writes tracts and things. You just sneak up and provide the divine afflatus. That ought to suffice.”

“The divine what?”

“Afflatus.”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that,” said Crowley, biting the inside of his cheek.

“No, I will not, and there is nothing wrong with this connection, you know exactly what I am talking about,” said Aziraphale firmly. “You only have to get him excited about some idea he’s already got. Which has something to do with tracts, I suppose. You’ll know when you see it. You’re good at that.”

“I am,” said Crowley absently. “What’re the specifics?”

Aziraphale told him. There was a soft scratching noise as Crowley made his notes on the hotel pad.

“Right,” he said at last. “Just to be certain. The name is Jack Chick?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the actual name.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“No wonder he wants the world to end,” said Crowley, clicking the pen. “Right.”

“You’re sure it’s not too much trouble?” said Aziraphale hopefully.

“’Course it’s not,” said Crowley, smiling. “I like tracts.”

Less hopefully: “And, er, of course, if there was anything _you_ needed taken care of on your own account here, I could …”

“Nah. Tell you what,” said Crowley, flipping his fingers through the memo pad, “this one’s on me. So happens I’ve got something else to get done on the way there. Distrust, despair, widespread littering, sort of thing.”

“Naturally, naturally.” Aziraphale’s voice was relieved. “Hardly needs your help out there, does it.”

“Hardly,” said Crowley.

[1] This last one consisted of O’Malley, Sullivan, and Kennedy, the office’s Catholics (so far as he could tell), and young Patel, who presumably already knew that he worshiped idols and might be set straight more directly.

[2] Assignments came as they came, of course, and Aziraphale had some decent times when he’d had to visit New York and Boston, but those places were not as relentlessly, well, _American_ at him. Whenever it was possible, he asked Crowley to see to his business stateside for him.


End file.
